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Thursday, 11 October 2012

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: the fanzine version

The Utopian dreams of social justice in
which many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in
spite of their impracticality and nonadaptation to present
environmental conditions, analogous to the saint's belief in an
existent kingdom of heaven. They help to break the general reign of
hardness, and are slow leavens of a better order.

[William James, The Varieties of
Religious Experience, quoted by Rebecca Solnit in A Paradise Built in
Hell]

I first found out on September 19. A
new album from Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I hadn't thought about
them for years, but you don't drown yourself in a band and live on
unscathed. Like most fans, I hear the words “the car's on fire”
and am submerged again: every note of The Dead Flag Blues seems to flood from somewhere
within me. I am F#A#oo and Slow
Riot For a New Zero Kanada, because those were
my lost years, my years of struggling to figure out what to do with
myself and leaving home and always the not knowing and a feeling of
irrelevance. By the time they released Levez Vos Skinny Fists in 2000, stars had aligned: I
had a good job, my own flat. But even in that daffodil-yellow
bedroom, there would be days when I returned to Godspeed inexorably,
with a darkness of heart that needed hope. Always hope.

And now I write about music as part of
my work and here was this offer: to interview Godspeed, the only
mainstream-press interview for 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!. On
September 20, to get us started, I sat down to write some questions,
and couldn't do it. I listened to F#A# and Slow Riot and was dragged
back in time: to the night at All Tomorrow's Parties when I was
actually in the same room as them, willing myself to overcome all
shyness and just say hello, but failing; to the strange weeks when a
shadowy stranger with electric hair haunted my dreams; to the NME
interviews with them that I read even though
I'm sure I'd stopped buying it by then. Too much memory, too much
weird obsession. So I didn't write questions. I wrote a love letter.
The middle of it went like this:

this afternoon when I got the call from
the guardian about doing this with you I was really excited, but now
I just feel tongue-tied. It's not that i'm worried about coming
across all fan-girl – that is inevitable – more that you belong
to another time in my life, almost, and encountering you again is
making me encounter that person again... maybe...

so tonight I have mostly been listening
again to f#a# and slow riot and trying to remember the rooms in which
I used to listen to them, except somehow I can't, because mostly I
would listen with the lights out, and maybe it's useful to know that
I have always been afraid of the dark, yet with this music I could be
in the dark and feel safe. And i've been rediscovering actually how
bleak some of that music sounds, something i'd forgotten in the
passage of time. And how beautiful and resilient and gentle and sad
some of it is. And how angry and militant and desperate for change.
And how it is all of these things within single pieces of music,
swelling and subsiding, one thought scratching away at another. And
thinking that maybe these contradictions are not solely a condition
of being a collective, but reflect internal contradiction within
individuals, a living within paradox, so that life is one long
argument with the self. Maybe.

There's a reason I haven't listened to
these records in a long time. Six years ago I married, I have two
kids now. It's not that music no longer defines and maps my
existence, it absolutely does, but the existence has changed. Or
rather, the external conditions of it have. As it happens, this is a
week of confusion and possibly transition, a week of – as a
theatre-maker i've just been working with beautifully phrased it –
living in the space between the failure and the recovery. I'm not
sure why i'm telling you that, except it seems to me something of
what godspeed do exists in that space too. I live in this incredibly
conventional, societally, space, and constantly pull against it, look
for ways to subvert it. Not surprisingly, the possibilities of
subversion feel a lot narrower when you have kids, because you spend
a lot of time scared that whatever you do will fuck up their lives.
And I think i'm telling you that because I was one of those people –
i'm sure there were heaps of us, and i'm sure, ok no I assume, and
assumptions are dangerous I know, that we kind of fucking annoyed you
– people who existed within privilege of whatever description, who
found the framing of godspeed desperately romantic. By framing I mean
the hotel2tango and the rejection of
capitalism/consumerism/media/everything I enjoyed or at least took
advantage of without proper question. I bet I thought I was
questioning it. I know I wasn't when I look back, because I wasn't
doing any of the things I do now.

Is it useful to tell you what I do now?
Apart from writing for the guardian about music, I write about
theatre, for the guardian too, but mostly in my own blog, where I
think about theatre as a place where we create the world we want to
live in. although I don't make theatre myself, i'm part of a
community of makers who operate to greater or lesser extent outside
the mainstream, quiet subversives who know they can't make A
Difference on a grand scale, but also know that they can radically
affect people individually and find achievement and meaning in that.
One of them wrote a poem for a thing i'm working on that ended with
the words:

political theatre never really changed
anything

but we still breathe together

and that's been very much in my head
tonight as i've been reading through old interviews with you and
listening to the albums and rewinding time by a decade, back to a
time when – is it just me? Has my memory warped? - when we had no
fucking idea how bad things would get. But maybe it was always this
bad? I grew up under thatcher but had no real sense of politics then.
Even now, I'm never sure I know the difference (in me, I mean)
between revolutionary fervour and sheer naivety.

And maybe this is why I feel
tongue-tied. I'm not the same person I was 10 years ago. But also I
am. And maybe the individuals who now make up godspeed are and
aren't, and maybe it makes no difference, because maybe godspeed has
its own identity, a morass of contradictions sure but an identity
none the less, one that whatever particular group of people you are
now has decided to step back into, for whatever reason.

*

There's another bit, but that will come later; and there was an attempt at actual questions, but – as
I said to them – everything I tried to ask felt so prosaic, so
cheap. Sunday 23, I tried again. The letter I wrote was a mess,
inchoate and overexcitable, because I was listening to 'Allelujah!
for the first, second and third times, and it was brilliant, vivid
and furious and alive, and because my own life was in brittle
confusion that very night and here, once again, was the soundtrack. I
knew it was a big ask: 3000 words across two letters for them to
untangle and respond to. Even so, I was disappointed when the call
came a couple of days later, to say that they were busy rehearsing
for their tour, and could they have a more conventional list of
questions. This is what I sent:

To me, Godspeed is more than just a
band, it's an idea. Is that true for you? What if you don't all agree
with the idea?

Who are Godspeed now? Who has stayed,
who has left, who has joined, and why have they joined?

More metaphorically, who are Godspeed
now: in what ways have the people in the band from the beginning
changed in the time of hiatus?

What is it that makes this a Godspeed
album, as opposed to any of the other bands you've been involved in
since Yanqui? Is it just a matter or personnel, or attitude?

Does political music change anything?
Do you want it to?

And is that intention for change
external, or internal: a changing of hearts, not of social
structures?

Do you still think in terms of, to
quote Efrim, “a meaningful dialogue about how people cope”?

To what extent does Montreal/its
politics make you the people you are and the band you are?

Do you have narratives in your heads
for your music? How problematic is it if people listening hear a
different narrative?

What was the process for making this
album? How was it similar/different to how earlier albums were made?
How Yanqui was made?

What prompted you to make a new album
after all this time?

Was there a time when you stopped
appreciating the opportunity to communicate with people through
music? Earlier interviews suggest it's something you've had
misgivings around; is that a misreading, and if not, do you still
feel that?

As a member of a dance group – 10
women, democratically run – I know full well how hard it is to
agree on anything. How does Godspeed operate as a community?

Do people like me just take you too
seriously?

*

I wrote them hurriedly, in a fit of
pique, and the answers that came a few days later betray hints of
frustration at having to talk to another clueless music journalist.
It's what I deserved, although I didn't think that straight away.
Instead, I got snagged on a line, about life on tour: “[we] got
heartbroken out there the way only true believers can.” That's what
I thought had happened to me. I had met my heroes, albeit only on
email, and been let down. I felt like the enemy in the equation, and
sent another letter, asking, among other things, whether it's
inconceivable to them that someone who writes about music as part of
their living could also be a kid in the front row. To which I've had
no response. Again, deservedly.

It wasn't until I started writing the piece for the Guardian that I began to appreciate properly the
answers they had sent me. The poetry. The honesty. The quiet moments
of personal revelation. I had felt too shy to ask anything private;
in any case, the collective face acts against that. And so I didn't
notice at first the intimacy of the response. Editing these streams
of text down and chopping them around for a 1600-word feature felt
like an act of craven appropriation. It's my job. But it felt wrong.

What follows is an attempt at the same
Q&A that's been published on the Guardian, but with more of the
thinking behind the questions. The fanzine version, if you like. It's
pure vanity, of course: I wish I'd been more careful with the
questions, and this allows me to rewrite them. Not a word, not a
punctuation mark, in what Godspeed sent me has been changed.

*

The first set grew from the first
letter: “maybe godspeed has its own identity, a morass of
contradictions sure but an identity none the less, one that whatever
particular group of people you are now has decided to step back into,
for whatever reason.” I so wish I hadn't used the phrase “just a
band”.

To me, Godspeed is more than just a
band, it's an idea. Is that true for you? What if you don't all agree
with the idea? More metaphorically, who are Godspeed now: in what
ways have the people in the band from the beginning changed in the
time of hiatus?

we're a band. we're not "just a
band", we're a band. us against the world, yeah? like so many
other poor suckers before us. bands get chewed up in the gears before
the rest of the world does. and then bands sing pretty songs while
they they get chewed up that way.

the dull fact is, we spend
most of our time engaged with the task at hand= rehearsing, writing,
booking tours. we do our best to get along, to stay engaged with each
other and with the shared labour. we feel like most of the stuff we
have to muddle through is the same sort of stuff that countless other
bands have to muddle through. nothing special, nothing interesting.
it's just that we make decisions based on a particular stubborn
calculus. it's just that there's a certain sort of ringing that we
chase when we rattle our bones in our tiny practice-room. it's just
that we like the sound of things a little out of tune. it's just that
we know that music is just a thing that people make in between bigger
struggles. and all along we've been tilting at windmills, worried
that we're about to get bucked from the saddle.

we started
making this noise together when we were young and broke- the only
thing we knew for sure was that professional music-writers seemed
hopelessly out of touch and nobody gave a shit about the shit we
loved except for us. talking about punk-rock with freelancers, then
as now, was like farting at a fundraiser, a thing that got you kicked
out of the party.

we knew that there were other people out
there who felt the same way, and we wanted to bypass what we saw as
unnecessary hurdles, and find those people on our own. we were proud
and shy motherfuckers, and we engaged with the world thusly. means we
decided no singer no leader no interviews no press photos. we played
sitting down and projected movies on top of us. no rock poses. we
wrote songs as long or as short as we wanted. basement feedback
recordings with cigarette butts stuffed in our ears. meanwhile our
personal lives were a mess.

and so we hit the road as soon as
we could. and got heartbroken out there the way only true believers
can. you string a kite too long upon its string, sooner or later it
ends up stranded on the moon.

whatever politics we had were
born out of always being broke and living through a time when the
dominant narrative was that everything was fine and always would be
fine forever. clearly this was a lie. but clinton was president, the
berlin wall was down, our economies were booming, and the internet
was a shiny new thing that was going to liberate us all. the
gatekeepers gazed upon their kingdom and declared that it was good.
meanwhile so many of us were locked out staring at all that gold from
the outside in.

so when we started earning rent from this
racket, we felt a lot of internal pressure to stay true to our
adolescent dissatisfactions (not adolescent like immature or naive,
adolescent like terminally disenfranchised and pure). and so we made
decisions that irritated a lot of people. we were barely articulate.
we didn't deal with outsiders well. we were used to speaking with our
own kind. we'd all of us spent our formative years outcast and a
little lost. we had no religion to shout at the rafters but all of us
all together all the time. and we shouted that religion at a time
when that kind of earnest noise was tagged as earnest, naive and
square. and we were earnest and naive and square. and still are.

a
thing a lot of people got wrong about us- when we did it the first
time, a whole lot of what we were about was joy. we tried to make
heavy music, joyously. times were heavy but the party line was
everything was okay. there were a lot of bands that reacted to that
by making moaning 'heavy' music that rang false. we hated that music,
we hated that privileging of individual angst, we wanted to make
music like ornette's 'friends and neighbours', a joyous difficult
noise that acknowledged the current predicament but dismissed it at
the same time. a music about all of us together or not at all. we
hated that we got characterized as a bummer thing. but we knew that
was other people's baggage, for us every tune started with the blues
but pointed to heaven near the end, because how could you find heaven
without acknowledging the current blues, right?

but now we
all live in harder times, now a whole lot of bands react to the
current heaviness by privileging the party-times, like some weird
scientology will to power bullshit, hit that hi-hat with a square's
fist until we all make it to heaven until sunday morning's bringdown.
self-conscious good-vibes like love-handles poking through some 22
year-old's american apparel t-shirt at some joint where you can only
dance once you pay a ten dollar cover charge just to listen to some
internet king's iPod.

and so now we thrum our joyous tension
in opposition to all of that. things are not okay. music should be
about things are not okay, or else shouldn't exist at all. the best
songs ever are the songs that ride that line. we just try to get
close to that perfection. us we drive all night just to get closer to
that perfect joyous noise, just to kiss the hem of that garment. we
love music we love people we love the noise we make.

Who
are Godspeed now? Who has stayed, who has left, who has joined, and
why have they joined?

godspeed's been the same lineup
since 1954. small changes= cello norsola's no longer playing with us.
and drummer bruce quit last year so's he could spend more time with
his kid. timothy's the new second drummer. we are stoked.

*

The next batch came from the second
letter, although Godspeed yoked them together in an unexpected way:

I looked up la loi 78 and fucking hell.
And now i'm trying to read up about the plan nord and that's made me
start looking at charest and i'm reading it all too quickly to take
it in properly but it all... looks symptomatic of a lack of genuinely
left politics in the 21st century, the apparent non-viability of
opposition to capitalist systems... What is your alternative? For the
past few months i've been reading a book called Crack Capitalism by
John Holloway, have you come across it?... He gives me such faith in
the small, seemingly insignificant acts of defiance. Everything about
this album – the sleeves notes, the songs titles, every fucking
note – feels like a massive act of defiance. That's become my
alternative.

...This thought is not consecutive, or
even a question exactly, but thinking about we drift like worried
fire, something about that music... feels
straightforwardly/conventionally joyful in a way I don't think i've
heard from you before, it sounds to me – this is quite late on in
the song now – as though a running away is happening from some
malevolent force and in the moment of escape every bit of music just
beams. All the more so because of the journey taken to get there, an
apprehensive search that leads to a sharing, a communal place, some
romance too... that's the question, isn't it: about the imposing of
narrative, and the extent to which you have a narrative or maybe
multiple narratives in your heads for these songs, and how much it
troubles you when the narratives imposed don't match your own...?

and the narrative I keep coming back to
is this one of the romantic outsiders/defiers, and how with you maybe
it's purely a matter of geography, because montreal is canadian not
american, and earlier I was reading something godspeed-related
online, in pitchfork I think, making a deal out of you being
non-american, and the way he did it really irritated me, yet I know
i'm seduced by something within it, like it's a defiance to the
american belief system that strangles us all that you had the
bravery/temerity NOT EVEN TO BE FUCKING BORN THERE! HA! But again, I
should be asking questions so: tell me how montreal makes you.

Does political music change
anything? Do you want it to? And is that intention for change
external, or internal: a changing of hearts, not of social
structures? To what extent does Montreal/its politics make you
the people you are and the band you are? Do you have narratives
in your heads for your music? How problematic is it if people
listening hear a different narrative?

what's political
music? all music is political, right? you either make music that
pleases the king and his court, or you make music for the serfs
outside the walls. it's what music (and culture) is for, right? to
distract or confront, or both at the same time? so many of us know
already that shit is fucked.

in a lot of crucial ways, its
easier to find common cause than it was ten or twenty years ago. you
talk to strangers in bars or on the street, and you realize that
we're all up to our eyeballs in it, right? so that right now, there's
more of us than ever. it's a true fact. everyday it gets a little
harder to pretend that everything's okay. the rich keep getting more
and we keep getting less. post 9/11 post 7/7 there's a police state
that tightens more every day, and in our day-to-days, we're all
witnesses to the demeaning outcomes of debauched governance= random
traffic stops, collapsing infrastructure, corrupt bureaucrats and
milk-fed police with their petty intrusions. our cities are broke,
they lay patches on top of patches of concrete, our forests cut down
and sold to make newspapers just to tell us about traffic that we get
stuck in. you get a parking ticket and you waste a day in line. cop
shoots kid, kid shoots kid, homeless man dies waiting to see a
doctor, old men lay in hospital beds while a broken bureaucracy
steals aways whats left of their dignity. folks flee to our shores,
running from the messes we've made in their countries, and we treat
them like thieves. mostly it feels like whatever you love is just
going to get torn away. turn on the radio, and it's a fucking
horrorshow, the things our governments do in our name, just to fatten
themselves on our steady decline. meanwhile most of us are hammering
away at a terrible self-alienation, mistreated, lied to and blamed.
burning fields and a sky filled with drones. the fruit rots on the
vine while millions starve.

so we're at a particular junction
in history now where it's clear that something has to give- problem
is that things could tip any which way. we're excited and terrified,
we sit down and try to make a joyous noise. but fuck us, we make
instrumental music, means that we have to work hard at creating a
context that fucks with the document and points in the general
direction of resistance and freedom. otherwise it's just pretty noise
saddled to whatever horse comes along. a lot of the time alls we know
is that we won't play the stupid game. someone tells us we're special
we say "fuck no we aren't special". someone asks us what
the thing we made means, we say figure it out for yourself, the clues
are all there. we think that stubornness is a virtue. we know that
this can be frustrating. it's fine. we don't think in terms of
narrative so much. we try to play arrangements that are little out of
our reach. we try to make sure the songs ring true or not at all.

montreal's a place that's always losing its charm. it's a
corrupt city in a corrupt province, where somehow the light rings
loudly anyhow. so many crazy plans hatched in spite of, so many minor
miracles. the dust of this place is caked into our scalps and beneath
our nails- there would be no band if it weren't for this lovely
rotten town.

meantime this town exploded recently, but there's
no victory yet. this province is still corrupt. this city is still
corrupt, and our broken country earns its gold hauling dirty oil. the
rich get richer from that, and the rest of us die slowly.

we're
all of us born beneath the weight of piss-poor governance. it's a
miracle that so many of us make it through our teens. politics is for
politicians and all our politicians have the whiff of death to them,
it's why they wear so much perfume and cologne, it's why they wear
brightly coloured scarves and ties, just to distract from the pallor
of their skin. so many of us just want to live away from that stench-
we stagger towards the light awkwardly, astonished that so many of us
are staggering together thusly, amen

*

Back to the second letter: ...the other
really heart-crushingly obvious question: what prompted this? I want
to think it's more than just “we got invited to do atp and then we
did some gigs and then we just started playing together again”. I
want to think it's more than “we learned how to be in the studio
together again”. I want to think there was a burning in your hearts
that hurt more and more with every passing day, with every dismal act
in the world outside that made existence within mainstream
society/culture that little bit less possible, that made the desire
to reach out to a community of others, not just local but global, a
challenge to the grim inhumanity of globalisation, that much more
forceful and demanding. I want to think there was an imperative to
make music, inchoate – because there are bits of mladic... that
lurch almost clumsily, and I love that, it feels very deliberate to
me, a chosen unmannered refusal to conform, even if it's to your own
sense of rhythm – and furious music as a strike against, as the
making of a crack, for us to listen to, to pick at and widen...

What was the process for making this
album? How was it similar/different to how earlier albums were made?
How Yanqui was made? What prompted you to make a new album after
all this time?

we got back together after ten years
apart, re-learned the old songs, played a few joints. we weren't
going to stay stuck on that retro circuit like sha-na-na at the
windsor autoshow. so at some point we decided to record- it's what
bands do. also, we felt like getting this shit down in case it
disappeared again. we set up in montreal, rolled tape and hoped for
the best. last time 'round that track, we argued like twin sisters,
this time we just let it roll.

*

The next was an amalgam of thoughts
from the first and second letters. From the first:

I go to edinburgh once a year for the
theatre festival, and there's a church there that I can't walk past
without quietly saluting godspeed. The reason is this: about a decade
ago, they had a banner strung across the front of the church with
just the single word HOPE printed on it, in huge black letters... The
two words, godspeed and hope, have always been synonymous in my head.
But I think my sense of hope has changed in that 10 years. I think
before it was hope for me, for my future, for what I might achieve.
Now i'm much more interested in what I can do for other people.
Reading back on old interviews with you, the same altruism/idealism
shines out – but with a corresponding anxiety that playing in a
rock band is a pretty fucking pointless way to achieve it. I hope you
don't feel that anxiety so much any more. But as someone who exists
in a maelstrom of anxiety at almost any given time, part of me would
be mildly astonished if you don't.

...Something I noted down from an
interview dating from 2000, attributed to efrim: “All we want to do
is to try and contribute to a meaningful dialogue. Ideally, there
would be dialogues happening all over, about how people cope, about
what we're doing with ourselves.”

From the second: Over the past 18
months, i've come to appreciate writing, having writing as a medium
through which to engage people in a dialogue with me not about how
the world is but how the world could be. I wonder if there was a
moment when you didn't appreciate music in this way. And if maybe now
you do.

Was there a time when you stopped
appreciating the opportunity to communicate with people through
music? Earlier interviews suggest it's something you've had
misgivings around; is that a misreading, and if not, do you still
feel that?

hell no, we never got tired of playing for
folks, we always felt lucky that we could. it's just that rock-biz,
then as now, is a miserable pigpen. pennies flushed, damaged ships
a-sailing just to sink, while somewhere in the corner lazy demons
chuckle and count their stacks. it's like watching millionaires piss
on cherubs. the money-makers hate the fucking kids and treat them
like chattel, milk them like cows, and lead them from waypoint to
waypoint like frantic shoppers on dollar days. for the most part, you
deal with privileged fools who are entirely insecure. they hate their
jobs, love the money and want more. somehow a whole lot of starving
heifers keep coming back to that trough for more. somewhere inside
they know that the milk is poison but they can't stop drinking.

beating against that wall tires you out- at a certain point
you gots to stop lest you break. also, while that battle's important
(because all battles against this normalized decline are important),
most of the world, justifiably, could give a fuck, there's more
important work being done out there, greater class-injustices than
music industry greed. and most of us in this broken world are barely
getting by, so you dive into this horrid music business mess
determined to do you your part to make it change, but then nothing
changes. you have victories that feel enormous but mostly nobody
notices but the kids in the front row. you worry over it until after
a while you start feeling like the annoying friend who can't stop
complaining about their ex. it gets so you don't want to think about
that babylon system no more. so we stopped. and then we started
again.

these days we're lucky old-timers, we throw our amps on
stage, put our heads down and play. after this many years of saying
no, those carpetbaggers don't bother with us much anymore. we work
with people we trust and hope that they trust us in return. we don't
fleece we don't slack we don't privilege our worries above the
worries of the kids in the front row. we play to the kids in the
front row because we used to be the kids in the front row. everything
else is just static, everything else is just dancing specks of white
and black skating on dead tv screens.

*

This is where I can really hear myself
sulking, even if they can't. For a moment I was contorted by
suspicion: that the whole “collective” thing is a lie. Hurt pride
can be so stupid. As this open
letter on the Godspeed website shows, they've
faced this before. Maybe all music journalists are the fucking same
after all. I later apologised.

As a member of a dance group – 10
women, democratically run – I know full well how hard it is to
agree on anything. How does Godspeed operate as a community?

your
car breaks and you take it to the garage, dirty room, 5 mechanics
maybe, car keys hung on nails next to the front counter. two cars on
lifts, one car in the corner, all the other cars parked in the back.
everything and everybody is covered in grease, everyone's smoking
like crazy. they have to fix twenty cars before 5 PM, or else the
backlog will fucking break everybody's back until christmas. the
parts suppliers roll in every half-hour or so, mostly bringing new
brake pads and flex-hoses, but bumpers sometimes, oil-pans, headlight
assemblies or timing belts.

in a good garage, the whole mess
of it almost collapses all day long. dudes yell and argue,
everything's going wrong and why are we doing this anyways. the hose
won't fucking fit, or the screwdriver slips and you lose the
hose-clamp somewhere beneath the undercarriage. the sun starts to set
and the floor gets littered with burnt bulbs, spent gaskets, oil, and
sweat, and brake fluid. someone's hungover, someone's heartbroken,
someone couldn't sleep last night, someone feels unappreciated, but
all that matters is making it through the pile, the labor is shared
and there's a perfect broken poetry to the hammering and yelling, the
whine of the air compressor kicking to life every 5 minutes or
so.

it all seems impossible. but somehow we make it through
the pile. the cars run again. the cars drive away. rough day but now
it's done, and everything's fine everything's better than fine.
tomorrow we'll do it all over again. you deal with the volvo, i'll
deal with the toyota. heat and noise. all day everyday until it's
quiet again. we fix cars until we die. we love fixing cars.

*

And in all my favourite bits of the
interview – the kite stranded on the moon, the staggering together
thusly amen, the dust of Montreal, we love music we love people we
love the noise we make, the absurdly detailed love of fixing cars –
this might actually be my favourite. It's simple. It's funny. It's
true.

Do people like me just take you too
seriously?

probably.

*

I've said it to them privately, but
wanted to say it publicly, too. Thank you. Thank you for the
communication, for the intensity of thought, for the trust. Thank you
for being as earnest and naive and square with me as I feel always,
and as I feel around you. I understand why they are wary of me: I
represent what they reject. But my outsider heart loves them, and I
hope they know that's true.